Chapter 2
The lab is mine at this hour. Quiet. The incubators hum their low constant hum — forty-three embryos suspended in culture media, waiting for transfer day.
This is the part of my job I love. The precision.
The control. In here, I can make conditions optimal.
It's the one place in my life where wanting something hard enough — combined with expertise and the right equipment — actually works.
My phone buzzes on the bench. A text from Jordan.
Thank you for being so amazing yesterday. I was terrified to tell you. You're my person. ??
I stare at it. Type back: Always. Now go eat some protein and take your prenatal.
Professional. Warm. Correct.
I put my phone face-down and pull up the morning's procedure list. Two egg retrievals.
One frozen embryo transfer. Consult with a new patient — age 41, AMH of 0.
4, practically baseline. I already know what I'll tell her.
Donor eggs. Or acceptance. Those are the honest options, and I've learned the hard way that giving false hope is cruelty dressed up as kindness.
Also on my list: email IT about the badge system.
Mine was acting up last month — security reset everyone's credentials after a software update.
The new badges are supposed to be more secure, but the transition was messy.
For two weeks, half the staff was propping doors open with textbooks.
I reported it. Filed the ticket. Moved on.
Devi arrives at 7:02. I hear her before I see her — the specific way she drops her bag on the break room counter, the click of the coffee machine being jabbed with more force than necessary, the mutter she does when it's slow.
Something in Tamil — I've asked her what it means and she just said "encouragement.
" Thirty seconds later she appears at the lab door holding two mugs, steam rising from both.
"You haven't eaten," she says. It's not a question.
"I had coffee at home."
"That's not eating. Coffee is a liquid. It doesn't count." She sets a mug in front of me — chai, not coffee. The good kind, with cardamom. The steam curls up between us. "I brought idli. In the break room. You'll eat them at eight. Not eight-fifteen. Not eight-thirty. Eight."
"Devi."
"At eight." She pulls her lab coat from the hook, snaps her gloves on with that sharp sound — latex against wrist, decisive.
Checks the cryo tanks without being asked.
This is our rhythm. Has been for three years, since she transferred in from the research wing and decided, apparently, that keeping me fed was part of her job description.
I never asked her to. She never asked permission.
She just started doing it — the chai, the food, the blunt observations about my sleeping habits and my weight and whether I'd eaten anything green in the last forty-eight hours.
"Good weekend?" she asks, scanning the nitrogen levels. The digital readout flickers — three tanks, three numbers, all within range.
"Brunch with the girls. Jordan's pregnant."
Devi's hands stop. She looks at me — not with pity, not with the careful face people usually make. She looks at me the way she looks at a specimen that's displaying unexpected cell behavior. Assessing.
"How pregnant?"
"Twelve weeks."
"And how are you?"
"Fine. Genuinely fine. I'm happy for her."
Devi holds my gaze for one second too long, then turns back to the tanks. "Okay," she says. In the same tone she uses when I tell her a machine is functioning normally and she doesn't believe me.
* * *
The first retrieval is at 8:30. Dr. Parekh handles the procedure; I handle what comes after. My hands are steady. They're always steady in here.
Between procedures, I eat Devi's idli at my desk.
Two. I should eat three but my stomach is strange today — not sick, just occupied.
Like it's holding something and there's no room for food.
The idli is perfect — soft, slightly sour from fermentation, the coconut chutney in a separate container with a sticky note that says EAT BOTH in Devi's angular handwriting.
The second retrieval goes smoothly. The frozen transfer goes smoothly.
The transfer patient — a woman named Sarah, 36, third attempt — holds her breath when I place the catheter, and I tell her what I always tell them: "Breathe normally.
The embryo doesn't know the difference." She laughs.
They always laugh at that. It's not quite true — stress hormones matter, cortisol matters — but the laugh relaxes them, and relaxation matters more.
Everything goes smoothly because this is what I do.
I am excellent at this. Six years, three hundred and seventeen successful cycles attributed to my lab.
My pregnancy rates are above the national average. I track them. Of course I track them.
Three hundred and seventeen babies that exist because I handled their first hours of life with precision. Zero that are mine.
The new patient consult is at 2 PM. Linda, 41, teacher — AFC of three, AMH of 0.
4. I've seen this conversation three hundred times.
The hope leaving in stages. Her husband's hand on her knee the whole time, and I think about Ryan — who sat on the edge of our bed fourteen months ago and said, "I think we need to stop.
I think this is killing us." And we stopped.
And something between us went quiet in a way that hasn't un-quieted since.
* * *
At 5 PM, I'm finishing paperwork when my phone lights up. A photo from Jordan — a onesie she bought, yellow with tiny ducks. The text says: Is it too early for this???
I type back: Never too early for ducks. ??
And then I'm holding my phone, looking at the photo, and the thing I didn't want to think about is back. Not loud. Not urgent. Just present. A low frequency hum.
Late February. Conception: late May, early June.
Jordan told me she met Tyler at a Fourth of July barbecue.
That's what she said. I can see the text — backward baseball cap, hot dog, Met someone.
Don't jinx it. July fourth. So the baby isn't Tyler's.
Or Tyler existed before July fourth and the barbecue story was just when she decided to tell us.
That's possible. That's the simple explanation.
But Jordan tells me everything. She's told me everything since we were nineteen and sharing a dorm room with a shower curtain for a wall divider.
She texted me when she lost her virginity.
She texted me when she thought she had an STI (she didn't).
She texted me when she started sleeping with her boss two years ago (bad idea, I said, and I was right). She tells me everything.
If she'd been seeing someone in May, she would have told me.
Unless.
I lock my phone. Set it face-down on the desk. Three breaths. In, hold, out. In, hold, out. In, hold, out.
Unless the person she was seeing in May was someone she couldn't tell me about.
"You're making the face," Devi says from across the lab. She's cleaning the ICSI station, wiping down the micromanipulators with the precise motions of someone who does this every day and will do it again tomorrow.
"What face?"
"The one where you're doing math you don't want to be doing."
I almost laugh. "I'm always doing math."
"Not this kind." She sets down her cloth. Leans against the bench. "The pregnant friend. Something's bothering you."
"Nothing's bothering me."
"Chloe."
I look at her. She's twenty-eight and sometimes she looks at me like she's my older sister. Like she's seen this before — not the specifics, but the shape of it.
"The dates don't quite add up," I say. "That's all. She says she met her boyfriend in July but the baby was conceived in June. It's probably nothing. Probably just — I'm doing the math wrong. Or she's rounding."
"You've been calculating conception dates for six years. You've never gotten one wrong."
"There's a first time for everything."
"No there isn't. Not for you." She folds her arms. "What's the real question?"
I don't answer for a long time. The incubator alarm beeps — soft, distant, a reminder that life continues on its schedule regardless of what's happening in my head.
"My husband was in Nashville the same week she was," I say. Quietly. Like if I say it quiet enough it won't be real. "And she says the baby is from a sperm donor at a clinic in Nashville."
Devi is very still. Then: "That's a lot of Nashville for two people who live here."
"It could be a coincidence."
Devi is quiet for a moment. Then: "Or she's not."
"Devi."
"I'm just saying what you already know." She turns back to her cleaning. "You calculate conception dates for a living. You're not doing the math wrong."
The lab hums around us. Forty-three embryos growing in their incubators. Temperature steady. pH steady. Everything controlled.
Except the number in my head, which won't hold still. Which keeps pointing to a week in early June when my husband was in Nashville and my best friend was supposedly visiting her sister.
Her sister who lives in Memphis.
An hour from Nashville.
I pick up my phone. I pull up Jordan's Instagram from June. Scroll back. Back. There — June 4th. A photo of iced coffee on a patio table. The caption: Sister time. ??
No location tag. No sister in the frame. Just coffee and sunlight and a table I don't recognize.
I zoom in on the coffee cup. There's a logo. Small, blurry. I can't quite make it out.
I screenshot it anyway.
I open Google on my work computer. Clear the search bar. Type: coffee shops Nashville bird logo.
Three results. The first is a chain. The second is closed. The third is a place called Wren & Co. on 5th Avenue, Nashville. Independent. Known for their iced coffee. Their logo is a small wren inside a circle.
I look at the screenshot. I look at the search result. Back to the screenshot.
Same logo.
Jordan was in Nashville. Not Memphis. Not with her sister. Nashville. The same week Ryan was there for his sales conference.
My hand is flat on the desk. I press it there — feeling the surface, the cool laminate, the slight ridge where two pieces meet. Real things. Physical things. Things that don't shift when you look at them from a different angle.
"You're still here." Devi is at the door. Lab coat off. Bag over her shoulder. It's past six — I didn't notice. "I'm leaving. You should too."
"Yeah. In a minute."
She looks at my face. At the phone on the desk with its screenshot still visible. At my hand flat on the surface like I'm holding myself in place.
"Chloe."
"I'm fine."
"You're googling something that's upsetting you at six PM on a Monday. That's not fine." She sets her bag down. Leans against the doorframe. "What did you find?"
"Nothing. A coffee cup. A logo. It's — I'm making connections that aren't there."
"Or you're making connections that are." She studies me the way she studies a culture that isn't behaving as expected. "Go home. Sleep on it. If it still looks like something in the morning, it's something."
She leaves. I close the browser. Log out. Gather my things.
But I don't delete the screenshot. And the logo stays — Wren & Co., 5th Avenue, Nashville — sharp and clear behind my eyes all the way home.